SEO For a House Clearance Company: The £500k Case Study

How do you take a small house clearance company with a turnover of £70,000 and in 4 years, turn it into a business that generates income in excess of £500,000? Well, that’s precisely what we’ve helped Avery Associates (formerly City Clearances) achieve with our SEO and online marketing services.

The Background

We first heard from Jeff Avery, the Managing Director of Avery Associates in late 2010 when he contacted us regarding some directories we managed at the time. From that conversation, we established that Jeff was an ambitious man with grand plans for his relatively small house clearance company.

At the time, Jeff was managing all his own website and marketing activities that were achieving some limited results there were a lot of areas that we knew we could help Jeff to improve upon. So we set about working on a strategy that would help Jeff to become one of the leading house clearance companies in the South East.

The Stages of Success

STAGE 1- The first thing we did was to totally redesign Jeff’s website so that is had a more professional look. As part of our research into the house clearance industry, we realised that the quality (and profitability) of the work available differed greatly, and Jeff was keen to attract the more lucrative clearance work rather than the cheaper jobs.

With this in mind, we wanted to create a more professional-looking website that had a feel of a law firm. The aim was to install trust and credibility for the website users whilst deliberately avoiding references to the junk and rubbish removal markets that tended to attract those lower-priced jobs.

STAGE 2- Once the website had been redesigned, it was time to start work on the SEO for the new website. We installed Google analytics and over a period of weeks, we analysed how people were finding the website via Google and we worked on improving the relevancy and content for search terms that the website was already getting a trickle of traffic from.

This strategy works incredibly well for websites where a page already ranks but not necessarily in the top-5 results and over time, we increased the traffic to the website by over 400%.

STAGE 3 – Once we’d optimised the existing content, we set-up a blog to start adding new content which would increase the website visibility in Google for additional keywords. One other issue that Jeff has was trying to rank for numerous geographical locations. This is a problem that many businesses have when they cover multiple locations.

For example, you can achieve the number one position for “house clearance in Chelsea” but then how do you achieve a similar position for other phrases such as “house clearance in Kensington” or “house clearance in West London”? We can’t reveal the exact strategy we use because that’s what our Clients pay us for but suffice to say, as of writing the website is on the first page of Google for over 200 geographical locations covering London, Surrey, Hampshire, Berkshire and Kent.

Moving Forward & Rebranding

Jeff was doing exceptionally well with his business and as we entered 2014, we started realising that he was getting a lot of traffic for a specific service that he offered; a service that was associated with house clearance but more profitable and far less problematic to deliver.

So we once again set to work helping Jeff to improve the content of his website and to optimise this particular service for a number of geographical locations. Again, we secured first page positions on Google for over 100 different locations in the South East.

The final task of 2014 was a new design for the website and a re-brand. As Jeff’s business had developed and his company now offered far more than a basic house clearance service, he wanted to change the business name from City Clearances to Avery Associates. However, this meant moving the website onto a completely new domain name whilst retaining all the rankings and traffic from Google.

With a lot of careful planning, we moved all of the website content onto a brand new, mobile optimised website located at at AveryAssociates.co.uk in December 2014. After a few nervous days, we were happy to report to Jeff that all of his rankings had been retained on the new website.

Final Conclusions

A lot of house clearance companies tend to think very small – they are happy to earn £30,000 – £40,000 a year and have no ambition beyond that. However, Jeff wanted to build a sustainable, saleable asset that he could eventually sell to fund his retirement and the only way to do that was to create something of value.

It’s been a real pleasure working with Jeff over the last 4 years and we’re genuinely excited to see where Avery Associates goes next and how we can help Jeff take his business past the £1 million turnover mark – watch this space.

If you’re interested in learning how SEO can help your business, head over to our web marketing page or if you’d like an informal chat about what we can do for you, give us a call on 01252 416 222.